Lose weight--control eating habit. Portion your food is just one of many techniques to eliminate the eating habit. Obesity along with all the associated health and self image issues is the cost of lack of food control.

In fact if all overeating were because of habit, it would be easy to lose all the weight one wanted to and keep it off. The problem is that for many decades, the over eating problem has been treated mainly as a habit. The most effective techniques for changing eating habit is awareness.

If you think about it, most techniques and programs such as Weight Watchers is about the overweight person becoming more aware. They use one or a combination of the following:
Diets which makes one very aware of the specific foods allowed on the diet and quantities.
Behavioral modification such as putting the fork down between bites, eating slowly...
Calorie counting.
Food Equivalents.
Weighing Food.
Stop thinking techniques.

True, these techniques do work for a period of time. However, over the long haul, there is a break down to the change. Eating habit returns to causing one to gain the weight back and then some.

Let's define eating out of habit. The easiest way to understand it is to relate with the person who stops at Dunkin Doughnuts every morning on his/her way to work. It's a habit. Or the person who comes home in the afternoon, walks through the living room into the kitchen, and opens the refrigerator door. It's a habit.

Break the habit and break the behavior. Take a different route to work. Find another activity in the afternoon to replace coming home. Or, if you do come home, climb in the back window instead of walking through the front door.

Any of these techniques are effective in breaking the eating habit. Weight comes off until... The "until" is an emotional stress at which point all the effort "goes out the door."

There are two factors that end the diet or whatever awareness technique that were being used:

1. To self berrate: The individual gets very upset with oneself and begins to wonder if they have a "mental problem." They call themselves stupid, dumb, asinine... They believe that this one incursion has completely ruined all their past successes and may even gorge themselves to get even with themselves. In other words, they have become their own worst enemy through their own thinking mechanisms.

2. They are totally ill equipped to handle the stressful emotion. The disappointment or success that led to the emotion yields a stressful situation in handling the emotion. This is because most of us have been trained to avoid emotions, control them, or pretend they don't exist. Even success leads to emotion? Yes, the emotion is happiness, yet it's amazing how many of us don't allow ourselves to feel happy. "Don't be too happy, you'll set yourself up for the big let down," is just one of several beliefs we've acquired towards happiness.

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